BBC Sports Personality of the Year 2012: shortlist celebrates GB’s greatest ever year

Alastair Cook has spent the past month rewriting cricket’s record books. With
his match-winning hundred in Calcutta, the hugely impressive England captain
moved to the top of the leaderboard of English centurions with 23 Test
hundreds.

In the same innings, at 27 he became the youngest man to accumulate 7,000 Test runs. At the rate he is passing landmarks, he is in line to become the most prodigious run-scorer in Test history.

Yet there is one milestone he will not be adding to his collection. He is not even nominated for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award. Nor is Ian Poulter, the talisman of Europe’s magnificent Ryder Cup-winning team. Nor are Laura Trott, Victoria Pendleton, Greg Rutherford, Charlotte Dujardin, Alistair Brownlee or Anthony Joshua, Olympic gold medallists all. Not even Jonny Marray made the grade. And he is a Wimbledon champion, for heaven’s sake.

In a normal year, any one of them would be in with a chance of receiving the sporting equivalent of an Oscar. Indeed any one of them would make a rather more appropriate winner than several who have recently been in receipt of the award.

This is generally the time of year when newspapers carry articles demanding to know what is the point of the Sports Personality of the Year (I know because I’ve written several of them). Its recent history has suggested it is a title rapidly losing meaning and purpose. You had to wonder when Zara Phillips won in 2006, or when Ryan Giggs picked up the gong in 2009, or Tony McCoy in 2010 exactly what was being celebrated. It appeared the well connected, the superannuated and those with a motivated voting lobby behind them were being rewarded; if they were the best of British over the previous 12 months how unimpressive were the rest? But then the award can only ever reflect what was going on at the time. And with winners like that, it was clearly not an expression of a fecund sporting culture.

Well, that will not happen this year. Because this is no normal year. This year the award reflects the grandest four seasons of sporting action any of us can remember. Tonight’s BBC show will allow us pause to recall exactly what we have seen, to remind us what a time we have had of it these past 12 months, to make us appreciate that yes, it did really happen.

We had a hint of what was in store when the Premier League season concluded in a last-second scramble that a Hollywood scriptwriter would dismiss as wholly improbable. A fortnight later, Chelsea won the Champions League final. That May night in Munich we should have realised something was afoot to upend our sporting preconceptions: an English team beat a German one in a penalty shoot-out.

After a Briton reached the final of the men’s singles at Wimbledon for the first time in 75 years, things appeared to be turning ridiculous when there was a British one-two in the Tour de France and a British winner of golf’s US PGA championship. There followed an unsurpassed London Olympics. Preceded by a rip tide of pessimism, from the first beat of the opening ceremony the Games triumphed over the naysayers, sparkling and fizzing like none before, sending an envy-inducing snapshot of our capital across the globe. And, more to the point, hanging bullion over the necks of our athletes.

After the first Paralympics ever to play out solely to packed houses, the successes just kept on coming. Inspired by the Games, a Briton won the US Open tennis. Then again on American soil, Britons propelled the European team to a most unlikely victory in the Ryder Cup. And still to come were unexpected success for England over the rugby world champions New Zealand and captain Cook’s evisceration of the Indian cricket team. That is some roll of honour.

This year to be the best of British is an accolade not to be handed over lightly. This is not the time to give a long-serving footballer or a much-injured jockey the equivalent of a lifetime’s achievement award. This year the Sports Personality matters. And to reflect 2012’s insistent glories, what a shortlist to choose from. Nicola Adams, Ben Ainslie, Jessica Ennis, Mo Farah, Katherine Grainger, Sir Chris Hoy, Rory McIlroy, Andy Murray, Ellie Simmonds, Sarah Storey, David Weir and Bradley Wiggins. At the very mention of that dozen names, images start to spool in the mind. Just to recall the Weirwolf or the Mobot or those Wiggins sideburns is to smile. All 12 have come to represent something that will long linger in our memory.

In the past, when the vote was conducted via a coupon clipped from the Radio Times, the count had been completed before the programme was screened. As they arrived at the BBC studio, those on the shortlist would be told if they had made the top three, to enable them to ready themselves for the uncomfortable notion of addressing the watching nation. Tonight, as the votes are phoned in, the result will remain unknown until the very last.

The bookies’ odds suggest that Wiggins, Ennis, Farah and the absent Murray — hard at work in his Miami training camp – might be advised to prepare an acceptance speech. To pick between that foursome, though, is the electoral equivalent of splitting hairs. In truth, any one of them would be an appropriate winner.

Ennis made light of crushing expectation to win the most technically demanding of all athletic pursuits. Farah did a distance double long considered to be close to a physical impossibility. Murray and Wiggins matched Olympic triumphs with historic achievement on other, wider stages. What heroes all. And how great for us to celebrate a collection of national figures whose renown has come not from appearing in a reality television show or winning the lottery, but from the ceaseless application of hard work. That, ultimately, is what will be celebrated in tonight’s glittering show.

For once, in a society in thrall to instant gratification, we can toast Britons who earned achievement through nothing but toil and grind, driven by the determination to make the most of their talent.